Talking to Elspeth, hearing the saga of her gums and wondering thoughshe was attractive and one of the originalhippies just how old she really could be andwhat she knew about Harry Lauder and the gambols of Little Tich butafter saying goodbye we ran into her once more coming down the escalator as we ascended and she heldout her wrist for me to smell as she'dbeen anointed at the free counter, soprogress had been made but theworst was, Magnus toldher I was mad about her, trying to help, but this went totally against and plan of campaign I everread about in the work of Proust.

No dose of the Suggie Southgate blognovel this week, friends. The tale ended last week with a battle between the immortals and the lycans in the sycamore grove. Following that, the trees were set on fire by nobody knows who. That was the end of Vauclare and his battalion of fiends. Or was it? You can still get the whole caboodle though: from the King Bat’s arrival in rural Harefield and his first encounters with the Supreme Godhead Outreach Church, all the way to the storming of Parkside and beyond. You can get it all in an ebook called Easy Blood.

Reading these steamy scenes week by week, Jade asked where it came from.

How should I know?

It’s true that the Christopher Lee movie, ‘Taste the Blood of Dracula’, was featured as one of the late Friday night bonanzas at the Odeon round about 1968. People on screen, and some in the seats around us, went mad and screamed. But the Count, the Count stayed cool, man. That stuck out, and the virus was inoculated somewhere in my imagination.

Then decades later I started spinning this tale about Eric Vauclare, a ruthless ‘immortal’ who was cool and sensitive enough to cry.

This is Rick Ransford we're talking about, who burned his balls in the shower and never even realized until his wife noticed the swelling. (From this it sounds as if his multiple sclerosis is pretty bad after all and getting worse, though apart from now being wheelchair bound practically I don't see many signs of deterioration in him.)

That old swashbuckling Rick who says for all he cares his pension money can go to a school in India rather than being devoted to getting him a decent top set of teeth or implants.Rick, the Bob Dylan of Stanmore Housing Estate, who when the swaggering toe rags down on the river bank were bragging about who they were going to beat up, sat in a quiet corner among the bushes while a number of girls gathered around him. He could start a good line of chat and they were drawn by 'his so potent art'.Who denies now that he had the best of it?Who was it that sent a Stanmore Housing Estate pin-up a letter suggesting she might like to 'do it in the road'? If it had been anyone else but Rick she would have raised an almighty stink about this correspondence.Rick, who forever praised up Ken Pettifer, the man who saved him from the Supreme Godhead Outreach Church.'When old Ken heard I had got into their clutches he went to see 'em and gave 'em a dose of the old Rugged Cross, straight from the shoulder,' says Rick.'Did they like it?''Do a rat like a terrier? Boy, he tore into those Outreach and quoted 'em up and down St John on this and St Mark on that. They couldn't refute a word of it or prove what he said was wrong.''Good old Ken,' I said.'Damn right. He told 'em to get out of it.''You were in serious danger of falling for their line of heresy, were you?''It was the first stages. The brain-washing had started, man, and though I consider myself fairly aware, at that point I saw them as nothing more than amiable pals on the Road to Jericho. When Ken got into it, the jig was up, man. The prophet spake, like, and the swine swirled over the Gadarene cliff into the gulf below.... Yeah, the gulf below.'As soon as I met Rick at the age of sixteen I could tell he was a one-off and no mistake.We had to write a character study for the English teacher and I created a fairly close picture of Rick which hinted at an impoverished past and mythological possibilities.The thing was written, I suppose, under the influence of Rider Haggard in some of his more long-winded outpourings about the Soul. I had always got B++ or higher from Mr Parkes before, but this time I rated a C- when my piece came back with dotted lines under some passages which he called 'bombastic' and 'inflated'. This led to Smicker, the class swot, claiming I had started a Michelin and Good Year school of prose writing.There was no thought of showing the masterpiece I had written about him to Rick himself, of course. If I had, he probably would have thought it was magnificent--I was after all a Grandison Grammar boy and sometimes top of the class. If I thought enough of something to scribble it down, that was enough of a recommendation for him any day.Rick was a bit gullible after all, or Ken Pettifer would never have needed to save him from the Supreme Godhead Outreach Church.

Hey debonair people, soon I will have a page on Story Cartel for the 'Jistabout' novel, A Prince in Gangland.

They work it so visitors to their website will be able to download a free copy in exchange for an honest review. I hope that friends and visitors here who have yet to get into the saga of the Royal House of Dalvad will take advantage of the promotion. That alternative Jistabout scene is a world of its own, bizarre yet familiar.

My friend Rick may be in a wheelchair because of multiple sclerosis but it doesn't hamper him more than necessary. Among the sallies he made yesterday was the snatching of a piece of fried bread from a plate on a deserted table as we coasted into Bonaparte's.Soon after we'd ordered he needed to go to the toilet and empty the bag on his leg or there could be a flood. So I wheeled him to the toilet door then he took over himself. Some time later I saw a pensioner helping him out through the door.'What is it, Rick?' I say, taking over from the other fellow with thanks. 'You managed it last time, so I thought you were all right. What's wrong?''Who knows?'Naturally I felt guilty, but you can't watch him every second.Well, he turned to his macaroni cheese and chips (all home cooked, they said). Before he took a bite he spooned a good two thirds of it into a black plastic bag to refry later.'They give you a lot here,' he said, 'and it's a bit of a job.''Yeah, especially since you still haven't got your top set of teeth, right?''You said it.''But why don't you get implants put in?' I say.'What? At £1000 a tooth?'

''You've got the money.''Well, I don't want to spend it on that. I can eat all right with my gums. And if I need to smile I make sure I keep my mouth shut, that's all.'We had two games of chess. I conceded the first when he got my queen five minutes into the game. There's no excuse but I suppose I was distracted, watching the world go by the big bay windows. Bonaparte's is so situated in the Mall that a lot of light pours in from the glass dome outside the restaurant. It's just such a great life movie to watch: all the girls gliding by on their lunch hour in casual summer outfits. You watch for people you know and don't see any, and you're amazed at the million you have never met and never will.Two or three times Rick checks to make sure I'll be phoning again to take him out next month.'You're the best friend I ever had,' he says. 'Old Barry was the other one.''Well, we were the Three Musketeers,' I said.'Yeah.' After wandering round the charity shops we get to the pick-up point to wait for his wife Rena and I see that Rick has in his hand a kiddies' book and a little shrink-wrapped pack containing a jigsaw puzzle.'How did you get those, Rick? I know you didn't buy them, as I'm handling all the money.''I just forgot and put them in the bag on my lap,' he says.'That's great, we're probably on CCTV. We're lucky they didn't collar us both as we were leaving, man. They'd think we were practising the old wheelchair scam and you can walk better than they can.'After the wheelchair rolls up the ramp into the car and they both disappear waving, I take the items back to the shop where they are accepted with a shrug and a grin. I'm not even sure it's the right shop as we'd been to one or two different charities, but I act confident and hope for the best and they sling them back on the shelf where they keep what Rick calls the 'grandchildren's stuff'.

I walk for the bus and reflect that without intending to Rick could drag somebody down to a place of policemen and fines and stories in the papers explaining that 'the shopkeeper was not suspicious at first.'

Call to readers: anyone who would like a free copy of the .mobi file (Kindle) of Outrageous Lilliput in exchange for an honest review, good or bad, please drop me an email. If you would prefer to have the same deal with another title, just let me know which.

﻿The bounties of the earth that are ignored! I got on a disc, amongst other comics, a score or more issues of 'Amazing Detective Cases' from 1950 and put a half-dozen of them onto the iPad to enjoy. These are tales from 'authentic police records', man.

This is world-class escapism. How I remember Mum coming home from the paper shop with a comic for me! The thrill is there again in these tales colourfully illustrated with that skill which had me awestruck. To me they still seem undervalued. What are they? Just pulp comics? Yeah! ... But what panache the artists and writers exercised in the work they scattered through arrays of monthly pulp magazines and all for what were probably subsistence wages.

And then when you think of the productions that are daily offered up now on the movie screen or on TV, thin on wit or invention but full of bombastic CGI effects and backed by bloated corporations determinededly grinding out the produce....

There's no justice, and little sense. It's a puzzle. (I know, I know: when were these things ever fair? Who guaranteed us a decent shake on this earth? Aye, it's a mad world, my masters.)

But comic books.... John Carradine, the famous character actor in the movies (he was the gentleman gambler in 'Stagecoach' and the infamous Robert Ford in 'Jesse James'), burned a whole pile of his son David's comics, describing them as trash. As David 'Kung Fu' Carradine said years later, those magazines would still be interesting to read today. They would have been worth money too, some of them. (His father probably would have preferred him to be reading Ayn Rand or Laurence Binyon.)

Talking about imagination though... I know I have just brought out a Kindle article on the madnesses and delusions of the poetry scene (Outrageous Lilliput), but I never denied in the course of writing it that in their line of creativity there was some good stuff going down. Great stuff, sometimes.

There were nights when wonderful entertainment and enlightenment was poured forth 'for a little clan' (as poetry almost always is). Two-figure audiences for poetry and jazz nights, for example. You had to ask yourself, Where was everybody? Didn't they want what was good? You wanted the world to share it, to be a part of an immortal night, but the world and his wife had other concerns, such as quiz shows on TV.

Some of the poetic renditions I've heard myself, while remaining unheralded, were now and then really and truly world class, man. Worthy of being issued as a box set of CDs at least.

But there you have it, the work would be dug by some dozen or so, then it dissipated into the night air. As flimsy as those ancient productions witnessed by Keats and starring, say, Edmund Kean. Or think of David Garrick's shows, or Kemble's. Or those of 'Master Betty'. Lost, all of them, on the trembling breezes. Blown away by the winds of time is that hour or two of intellectual reverie.

Some evidence remains though, the traces of these poesy garglers of some substance--the poems naturally exist printed out, many of them, in yellowing magazines if anyone would be interested to look. Masterpieces of their kind.

They exist, amongst the dross and the stodge on other pages. Who will find them? What generation will wish to search them out?

Last weekend we visited Somersbay to see Erica's paintings. She is at the High Street Gallery for eight days with her work: fairly large oil paintings, three or four feet wide at least.She has a good one of Vince in full spate singing unaccompanied in a French restaurant when they were on their honeymoon, his grey hair resplendent.The same grey hair, a good thatch, is shown in another picture which shows the Admiral Benbow pub. Working from photos, in this one she painted a very real-looking array of the customers with fiddles and squeezeboxes out, tattoos showing, etc. One exhibition visitor saw her father represented in the throng and cried--and he wasn't even dead yet. Erica attains an elflike realism here, down to the beer glasses on the table and the frothiness therein.Another had a tractor midfield with greedy seagulls. These were all good-sized, substantial pictures with a pleasing eye-candy feel. It's a world aslant to this one, where everything is clean and individual and yet there's a universal fermentation of vitality and give-and-take.Tha artist was glad to see us. We had said we were going, but of course everyone says that. In all we had four bus journeys to cope with that day, which shows commitment. Erica gave us big hugs.She was sharing the exhibition space with another lady who specialises in miniatures and greetings cards. Erica's efforts simply blew hers into the nowhere stratosphere.We got a complimentary glass of red wine. All we paid for that day was a cream tea later on. Our journeys were free as we had our bus passes. Also we had brought sandwiches and coffee. The one let-down was, we took two vacuum flasks we had not used before and they totally failed to keep the stuff hot. I had thought it was odd that the flasks felt warm to the touch--they were obviously losing heat, man.On the beach we found a shelter beside which were knee-tall seagulls exercising dominion over the air while a jackdaw used to getting visitors' crusts hopped around busily.We met Erica's brother Chas at the gallery, with his wife Pat, a Suffolk couple of the old school.Chas has dabbled with the brush himself.'But I haven't got the patience Erica has, you see. She sticks to it and takes pains with it, like.''What medium do you paint in?' I asked.'Oh, water colours. Gouache, you know--thick and opaque, that's how I like it. Erica has always been oils, always. Since about twelve.''The great thing about oils is, you can keep overpainting till you get it right,' said Pat. 'It's forgiving.''You always say that, but you can overpaint with gouache too,' said Chas with irritation. 'Let it dry and you can overpaint. Use your Chinese white if necessary. Of course, you mustn't let the picture get muddy--then it's best to rip it up and start again.'Chas also does local history research. He told us about railways that rolled underneath Currock in the 19th century. The tunnels remain today, sealed off and neglected. Apparently there are plaques all over town listing the different stops: the docks, Cardinals' Hill, the Brickworks, etc., and no one pays any attention to them.'I for one never noticed a thing,' I said.'What DO you notice?' said Jade.'On the other hand,' she added, 'it's a good job he never noticed the tunnels or he'd have been wanting to live in them.'

Soon I will be putting out a Kindle article of fifteen or twenty pages. It's the release of a pent-up bellowing, for those who get the resonance.A life up unto the age of 60 or more, in which my highest endeavour was devoted to a con trickthat we versifiers of the small press played upon ourselves. The trick goes on too. They still have the dream, some of them, and truly believe they are Heirs Apparent, man. They are still confident that the trail will lead to sunlit uplands where they will get their fame, the girl (or boy)--and even the money.In the small press world there were once three Richards: Richard Kraski, Richard Pumpernickel and Richard Schultz. They had their bickerings, but they were all, shall we say, reading from the same page. Richard Schultz edited that severe Birmingham-based magazine Verse & Diction. He worked for it near enough full-time for seventeen years, without a salary. No one asked him to. They probably thought that they didn't need to shell out any cash however, as getting his poetry and editorials printed would be a sufficient kick-back.(I wonder how many people actually read Verse & Diction. Even if you had stuff in it you would probably need a stiff drink before opening the neatly-produced small-print magazine.) These Richards had wrapped themselves in an armature of self-censoring blandness. You would have thought they had beards to their knees. They expected contributors to show commendable constraint also.People talked about the small press world as the talents' nursery garden. But the small press was just as much a battleground as the big. The small press was a world in itself, which tended to unfit you for service elsewhere. A small press reputation could go against you. If you wrote stuff that was entertaining for example, this was frowned on. Someone might say, 'I was at your reading the other night. It was fun.'

The point was that these guys had been at it for years. Who were you to say that they had been toiling away up the wrong alley? Had that tediousness been in vain? They had thought they were passing on some kind of tradition of understatement (or no statement).Lilliput will be my take on the gorgeous balderdash. You tricked yourself with a laugh and a shrug while enjoying a rich life--without the mazuma.Oh what an ant farm we there uncovered.Call it a parody, satire or naughtybiography. Call it a warning that will be discounted in the ongoing burlesque show of it all. Yeah, his dream may be gone, they think, but ours can become reality. I hope for them that it does, but even Keats himself failed to make money at the verse scribbling.Maybe after all the starry-eyed versifiers were not that crazy though. Finally, setting the financials to one side, you cannot regret the long and protracted trick. Could the ride have turned out to be worth the not getting there?

Dug out the Readers' Union copy of Raggle-Taggle, to indulge in another jaunt with that thick-waisted Irish traveller among the gypsies of Hungary and Roumania. About all he took with him, this Walter Starkie, was his violin, a rucksack, the repertoire which he had by heart, plus his improvisational skills.It's great prose, and the escapades are amusing and indiscreet. It's a treat to turn the pages of this beloved book and pore over the photographs and Rackham's drawings. (If ebooks were all we had to read, wouldn't it seem a luxury worthy of Rockefeller to have a collection of some 350 pages of prose smelling of days gone by and elegantly stitched and bound in hard covers for our pleasure? Book club edition or no?)I've done some busking, but this guy used his holiday from his scholastic post to live the life for months--employing the fiddle as his sole support in a Magyar/Gypsy world that by no means always showed him a smiling face.The nearest I came was busking for a morning in Little Wallingworth, then using my earnings to buy a loaf of fruit bread and a bottle of milk for sustenance so I could carry on warbling for half of the afternoon.Here and there Starkie analyses the folk music he plays--there are several staves included in the text to illustrate his points. It was well over my head, but some of the notes looked as if even I with practice could play them on the guitar.

The stolid, plains-dwelling Magyars and the fiery Romanies combined influences and formed the music Starkie revels in.

But that community of gypsies he found his way into was soon to face outright destruction by the Nazis.

Though his accounts of the origins of Hungarian music illustrated with comments from Bartok and Kodaly are interesting, I get a thrill when he confides such details as the rent of the dwelling he manages to find in Mezokovesd: one shilling and fourpence.It's great when a maid of all work whose red petticoat covers 'a portion of her bare legs' sits on his bed and points to his violin.Naturally, he plays her an oft-requested csardas.Starkie deplores the dying-off of the old music--it is being killed, he thinks, by the cinemas that have now started appearing on every corner, and by the influence of mass-produced American jazz.At times he sounds like a more manly D.H. Lawrence. (What would he make of today's electronic social media? What could he not deplore about YouTube?)

Is it that it was a different world some 80 or 90 years back? Was it easier to mix with horse-herders and nomads of the Hortobagy plain back then and see the mirages, the Fata Morgana or Delibab over the interminable plain? You have to doubt it.

Even though he is only living this life for a number of weeks and will go back to his home life, Starkie seems to me foolhardy when he throws in with anyone he happens to meet.That's why his book has the stench of the Garden of Eden and makes us see what happened not long ago, when men and women lived untamed and fierce, loving and hating at a pitch we do not have to experience when we can mediate our lives through the digital air that now enmeshes us all.

Vince picked us up before midday and we drove to Claxton Acre where 'pot luck lunch' awaited, and a celebration of the day of days of that oh so unEnglish St George. (Someone said he was a Turk, and the patron of a million bagatelles, apart from Old Blighty.) We all agreed it would be marvellous to see St Edmund back in the position of power. Yeah, reinstate the original boss saint, the one the Vikings slaughtered.It was Rob and Esther's house. All these folk out at Claxton Acre, devotees of the Divine Force movement, are good eggs if a bit subdued.'I gave out a mighty sigh when the boys went off to school today, I must admit,' said Esther. 'We love them, but we do like a bit of life of our own.'

I agree with you there, I thought to myself. Those boys are pests. No doubt they have every reason to create mayhem however, as they are stuck amongst this community of fairly elderly dullards and have no friends to play with. They do get stories told to them, of course, and are able to enjoy the offerings of visiting speakers and such artistes as Vince and myself. (Incidentally, the boys' thoughts on politics and the topics of the day are now and then listened to with interest.) It's all very wholesome but lads always have to find their devilment somewhere.For a while before the food was served up (hot baked potatoes, spicy rice, cheese, strawberries, scones, coffee), I was thinking, 'This is boring, how did I get stuck out here--never again.'

Of course Vince is great, he lives there with them and does the odd jobs and everything but without really being part of it. He for one, though an admirer, has not signed everything over to the Rajah of England, Wales and Northern Ireland.But: nice people. And once the grub was served and the talk got going things improved.

Then Vince and I jumped up and did a few numbers such as 'A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square' and 'I Only Have Eyes For You'.Jade is excellent at giving feedback on these gigs: no way does she candy coat it. And this time her verdict was: brilliant.I think it went so well because as we got up there I said to Vince 'Let's go at it slow and relaxed. Tell it like it is.' We did so, baby, preserving as we went the clipped 'teddibly English' vowels that were appropriate for a song about a favoured rendez-vous in the Smoke sung on Boss George's day.I mean, all along the folk were nice and friendly, except for one woman/girl who sat there snarled up and depressed.She was easily ignored.Rob read a poem out which was OK, about the last dragon killed in England. The final guest to arrive at the 'do' as always was Pia, the 66-year old opera diva. She insists on getting in on everything. She handed Esther the sheet music and the first thing she wanted had four sharps. Luckily, Esther is a marvel whether on piano or violin and probably the euphonium as well. She is so talented but so modest, Esther. She sees all her guests settled and provided with coffee. The stuff was decaffeinated, we heard with amazement. It was all properly perked, full stink just like the cowboy java Mick Riack introduced me to years ago. We would whip it up back then in his red enamel coffee pot like the ones used by Joel McCrea, Randolph Scott and others.